Month: February 2015

It always starts like this for me: the new year rises up on the horizon and tells me it’s time to Get Serious. It’s time to start worrying about the future of my life, that blank page stretching endlessly before me, all that white space that should be filled with five-year plans, with narrowed down career choices and grad school applications, with all the things that I should’ve begun by now… because by now, I should be an adult.

My initial efforts to stop the downward spiral, my self-care regimen of deep breaths and I’m thankful for lists, were quickly thwarted by the daily reminders of Success Elsewhere: An email from LinkedIn telling me whonow I needed to congratulate. A Facebook feed full of engagements and new houses and babies on the way. An instagrammed Paris. A tweet of a Book Deal. A claim on happiness. A life that is better.

I’d drive to Caribou and settle into the corner to make a “Life Plan” (Fix-My-Life Plan) only to close my MacBook five minutes later because the Future is too overwhelming. It is an anything-is-possible place, and for me, that’s terrifying. My anxious mind graffitis over it with all my worst fears. My biggest doubts.

This worrying is so ridiculous. My life is very good: I have a job that pays well and good friends to spend weekends with. I have a warm family, the best people, and they know me inside and out. I pay my own rent, do my own laundry, buy my own groceries and set my own bedtime. All things considered, you might call me an adult.

But there are these things that can work their way through the seams of your life. Inadequacy and Expectations. Wildest dreams, still unfulfilled. Altogether, they make up what the scientists are calling the Quarter Life Crisis.

I turned twenty-five this past month. A quarter of a century old. It was the first time I wanted to lie about my age.

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In 2015, time suddenly became rare and valuable, and so I started scratching all the things that appeared extravagant like reading and exercise, blogging and writing, making even the smallest amount of time for others. Then I took that surplus time and spent most of it at Caribou, where I stared for many minutes at Grad School applications I never finished, skimming blogs about climbing out of the Quarter Life Crisis and Ten Things I Wish I Knew Before Becoming a Teacher and trying to figure out a great pitch for a big magazine somewhere. I was thinking hard and dwelling deep and worrying myself to the bone.

I began to seriously question my own worth and abilities, and that’s when I knew something had gone terribly wrong.

I knew where I had to turn- but I really didn’t want to do that. It felt like failure. Like a confirmation of my collapse. To turn there, to go back there, would mean I had forgotten. And I hadn’t… had I?

With a desperate voice, I just said it anyway:

I am accepted.

I am loved.

I am enough.

And I stopped shaking.

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In a way, I was forced into these words. A friend had asked if I would speak at his church (which I have never done before) and I knew exactly what I wanted to talk about. My story: from self-loathing to self-love, my journey into the heart of the God That Sees Me.

In my circle here in Minnesota, I told only a few about this church thing. I was terrified about it. I am not a public speaker. That is not how I am built. So I told them I needed them their for moral support, and perhaps some kind reassuring words after I botched the whole thing.

They all came.

I sat on the stool beneath stage lights in front of a handful of people, and I saw every one of their grinning faces. For a half an hour, I got to watch my people show up for me.

Near the end of my talk, I said this:

I am accepted.

I am accepted.

I am accepted.

And it’s just three words, but they are my holy words. They are my song. The tied knot at the end of my story, the first words that started my ascent from the darkness, the words that found me.

I am accepted is such an easy thing to say, to yourself or to others… but believingit? That’s another conversation. That takes work. That takes a lifetime of learning and practicing and prayer. And if you’re here, in the Minnesota Winter of your Quarter Life Crisis, it can be impossible to hear it at all.

But in that moment, on that stage, my desperately hopeful theology was met with the proven witness gathered before me. The warm faces reminding me of the Success Here. The success in me. The success through me. The success to come. My words and my people, both pouring into one in my heart. I am accepted.

God is here, in the midst of my circle walking. In the coffee cups and the slouched sitting. In the panic and the fear and the rage, in the twenty-fifth year of my striving. He is here. And He is working something new in me. Something that cannot be rushed or scheduled or detailed down in a plan. God is saying to me, once again, for the millionth time: You Are Accepted. You are Loved. You are Enough.

It all adds up, even when it doesn’t appear to.

This is a weird winter and a weird season of life. I feel completely unprepared for it. But maybe it’s going to just be about those three words for now. That still small voice in my mind. That love, always there to catch me.

Deeper Story is closing and to be honest, I’m torn up about it. Before I joined as a Storyteller, I was a regular reader, taken captive-as many were- by the blunt and beautiful truths that tumble out when you choose to tell your story authentically. When you stop editing it down into something palatable, something safe. When you just say it- out loud- the big questions and hurts and joys, just as they are on your heart.

That’s what Deeper Story has been.

When I was invited to join, I felt like I had been asked to the prom. In the email from Sarah, she offered me a significant amount of time to pray and think and consider if I really wanted to do this, and in an effort to appear nonchalant about it, I waited awhile- give or take an hour- before I couldn’t help myself and responded with: YUP. I’M IN. THANK YOU. 🙂 (or some variation of that.)

I was only there for a short time, but it was a wonderful time. I’ve learned from some truly greater writers about things completely unrelated to writing. I’ve made new friendships that will continue into the future. I was challenged and forced to work harder on my writing than I ever have before (because how do you not stress over your words and your story when you have to stand there next to folks like John Blasé or Sarah Bessey or Addie Zierman or anyone else there.)

If I had to pick a favorite of my ten pieces, I would say the one below is it. It was my first piece. It was a post where I talked about something that I rarely do, a post in which I wanted to get raw and honest about my own fallen humanity and the beauty of God’s grace. My struggle with quitting smoking. (UPDATE: Not fully quit yet, but I have cut down significantly, to about two cigs a day, all of it due to a friendly modern invention called the E-Cigarette.)

Anyhow. Here’s my piece. Be sure, while it’s still open, to go check out all the different essays at the DS page!

Also- if you’re on the email list… I apologize in advance for the coming barrage. As I back up my essays onto this site, I don’t know how to do it without automatically sending out emails. I’m not techy enough.

Grace for the Addict

In the seventh grade, I won the Ramsey County Police Department Poetry Contest after I penned a poem telling anyone addicted to nicotine to juststop it. It was a district wide contest; a winner would be selected from every school. And a couple weeks after I submitted, my Language Arts teacher burst through the door of my history class. She walked straight up to my teacher and whispered in his ear. They both turned to me, smiling. I beamed back.

They gave me one hundred and fifty dollars. More money than I had ever held in my hands. And two weeks later, with my parents standing proud at the back wall and the local paper’s intern snapping shots next to them, I stood in front of my class and read the poem aloud.

“I know the chains of addiction may be holding you down, but think of your family! They still want you around!” I roared like FDR and the class went wild.

I am no poet. But my life has been riddled with irony. Here’s some: only a few years after speaking my plea into class, I was twirling the feathery white stick between my own two fingers. I was sparking the cherry at the end, inhaling it deep into my lungs. Over a lake, I lay down on a dock with friends, blowing filmy rings into the stars. Watching them rise and rise and wash away in the wind. Dizzied by the buzz that was breaking over me, I felt euphoric, badass, and truly alive. I did not feel the chain clinking around my ankle.

With all the statistics and health factswe have today, the ads of women reduced to robotic voices and amputees and phantom old men trying to hug their grandchildren, with all this information and truth out there, only the insane could still be smoking. And maybe I am, because I still do.

I still smoke. I had a cigarette ten minutes ago.

And I don’t know how to write about it and turn it into something sympathetic, or deep, or on some level, okay. I worry that I am disqualifying myself as a disciple or a serious person. It is a problem, yes, I know that; it is an addiction.

“It is idolatry,” one Christian friend told me in college, in our very first vulnerable conversation.

“You won’t feel God’s love until you quit,” said another girl who claimed the power of prophecy, who added that that this was a directive from the Lord she received in just that moment.

And I suppose, some elements of truth can be found there. Much of this is about choice. I turn to an addiction instead of the Answer to handle my anxiety. A lot of this comes down to temptation, self-control, sin.

But it’s also an addiction. A bind.A battle I have waged with every weapon. Once, I promised a friend I’d quit cold turkey and she promised to hold me accountable. By the third night, I snapped. “I can’t do it!” I cried over the phone as I sat rocking on the dock, huffing and puffing like a little engine. Like the little addict I was.

But why? You still ask. Why did you start?

Because I wanted a redemption story. A before and an after. A transformation. Because I couldn’t quit being gay and at sixteen, I stopped believing God cared about changing me at all. And I became obsessed about change.

So, in high school, I started dragging my soul down to the swamp of Bad Things, soaking it in deep. One day, I thought, I could wring it out and scrub it clean. One day, I believed, after all that scrubbing, purging, cleaning, just maybe, I’d become enough.

It took years to knock this illusion out of my head. I tasted real redemption when I finally accepted that I am accepted and washed myself in the waters of grace, in the river of his love, when I found my healing in this sacred Truth: I am loved deeply, and always.

There is no good excuse for the smoking, but there is some context here. And I think that’s why story matters so much. Because in one quick glance, you might just see another sad addict, but when you watch the journey leading to this place, it’s clear that I was a kid, just desperately looking for a way out. Lost just like everyone else in the complicated reality of growing up. And grace covers all of that. Covers me still.

It is National Poetry Month and in this month, Easter, and I’m thinking about how fitting that is. We’re celebrating the single greatest triumph of the world, Jesus defeating death, and we’re celebrating the ancient craft that has breathed space into a world divided by black and white, good and bad, the sacred and the secular, and the possible and the impossible. We’re rejoicing in the grace that is filling every chasm. Filling every single one of us.